HeartBeat™ Availability and Performance Monitoring for Voice Communications Solutions

Contact center and communications solutions offer companies a significant opportunity to control costs and improve customer satisfaction if maintained properly. If solution performance is not maintained after implementation, the opportunity becomes a risk and eventually customers are negatively impacted. With HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring, you validate the performance of your end-to-end contact center and communications solutions to assure the best possible experience for your customers and the best possible efficiencies and savings for your company.

IQ Services’ HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring goes beyond the traditional perspective of internal monitoring, by providing detailed and actionable information from the outside in or customer perspective – which is ultimately the perspective that matters most. Because HeartBeat™ calls are generated remotely and interact with your contact center and communications solutions just like real customers, you know what your customers are experiencing around the clock. You decide when and how to fix issues and optimize performance. Every component of your solution that is normally exercised by a customer can be monitored with HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring. If the host is down or there is an issue with your toll-free number provider or your system is dropping calls after playing just 3 seconds of the initial greeting, you’ll find out right away.

Instead of receiving anecdotal complaints or unsubstantiated claims from irritated customers and colleagues, HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring is configured to notify you and your team immediately if anything unexpected happens during a HeartBeat™ call. You also have access to robust, actionable data for each call – whether it goes as planned or not – including recordings, response times and results to help you identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible and to provide insight into ways you might optimize performance over time.

HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring is a 24x7 service. HeartBeat™ calls are generated at a specified hourly rate (e.g., 2 calls per hour, 12 calls per hour, etc.) and exercise your solution just like real calls traversing the PSTN by making appropriate DTMF and spoken inputs. IQ Services’ patented technology and proven methodologies are used to verify step responses, measure response times and capture other actionable data from each HeartBeat™ call so you know your solution is performing as expected 24x7.

The results of HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring give you confidence about your solutions’ performance and help you answer the lingering questions including, but not limited to:

• Are your customers able to access my solution RIGHT NOW?
• Do customer calls successfully get through the public telephone network?
• Are the calls being properly handled by your contact center solution?
• Do response times at key steps in the calling process meet your requirements for end-user customer experience?
• Does your contact center solution perform the same at all times of the day?
• Has something changed in the solution or production environment that has not been communicated or evaluated for impact on your customers?
• Do any trends in system performance indicate it is time to tune the system configuration or upgrade capacity?

IQ Services' techniques for monitoring contact center and communications solutions produce unmatched accuracy — and provide you with timely results:

• IQ Services’ patented test process, Audio Time Analysis, is proven to be extremely accurate in determining proper operation and identifying specific error conditions. Such precision is especially important in testing speech recognition systems. With these systems, it is crucial to know that each spoken phrase was correctly interpreted before the target system moves to the next step in the test sequence. Audio Time Analysis is so accurate it can usually tell the difference between two recordings of the same phrase spoken by the same person.
• IQ Services’ patented Screen Pop Testing methodology turns the tables on usual testing and monitoring procedures to cost-effectively validate CTI and screen pop functionality at the desktop as well as to obtain user experience results.
• IQ Services immediate notification process ensures your support team is made aware of issues within minutes of detection.
• IQ Services' secure, online monitoring results application – MonitorControl.net – provides timely monitoring results including access to recordings, response times, self-service controls and more.
  
  

Thanks to IQ Services for the article.